Put Out More FlagsThe Making of Another Americaby John Pilger
www.dissidentvoice.org
March 1, 2006First Published in The New Statesman

The
other day, one of my favorite cinemas closed down. The boards went up on
the art deco Valhalla in Sydney, one of the world's best at putting out
powerful, political documentaries. The lack of fuss might have seemed
surprising in a city whose iconic Opera House is said to embody modern
Australia's pride in the arts. On the contrary, the closure reflected a
more general shutting down.

The Valhalla was
certainly an anomaly in an Australia so entrapped by the cult of
"marketing" that an executive of the Sydney Morning Herald can
declare "the answer" is "not smart and clever people" but "people who can
execute your strategy." On 9 February, the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development in Paris proclaimed Australia the least
regulated and most privately owned economy in the western world. This is a
country owned and run by businessmen.

The most vivid
example is the press. Rupert Murdoch controls almost 70 percent of
principal newspaper circulation. With the exception of the multi-ethnic
Special Broadcasting Service and the radio network of the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation, the rest of the media reflect Murdochism and a
market ideology imported wholesale from the United States. The remarkable
culture wars of the neo-conservative Prime Minister, John Howard,
exemplify this.

Howard believes that
"business and sport" are society's prime movers. The country's
once-respected scientific research laboratories, the CSIRO, have been
instructed to take on business sponsors. Almost alone among nations,
Australia last year abstained rather than vote for a modest United Nations
proposal that members should defend "diversity" in their own cultures --
against rapacious great power. When Australia's leading playwright, David
Williamson, likened Howard's privatized "aspirational" Australia to a
cruise ship sailing to the "sobering destiny" of an environmental
disaster, his speech was "called for" by the prime minister's office and a
vicious campaign was orchestrated in the Murdoch press.

With no political
opposition to speak of, Howard's conquests have been in cultural life,
with historiography thrown in. Siding with an unchanging clique of
far-right commentators, he has effectively stifled debate about
Australia's bloody colonial past while deriding the "black armband theory
of history": that is, the truth of a genocidal racism that continues to
devastate the Aboriginal people. His patriotic, or "put out more flags,"
campaign is pure George W Bush. Schools have been ordered to erect
flagpoles, and on "Australia Day," 26 January, which "celebrates" the
"settlement" of another people's country, flags are distributed and often
displayed with gormless aggression.

This was never part
of Australian life; Americans wrapped themselves in their flag, but not we
Australians. We saw it as a respectful reminder of those who had gone to
fight and die in Australia's mostly catastrophic imperial wars, who "did
their best." The Howard regime has changed all this. The little leader
wears a plastic flag in his lapel, just like Bush, and puts his hand on
his heart, just like Bush, and reinforces a race-based society, just like
Bush. While the neglect of New Orleans is Bush's symbol, the contempt
shown the first Australians is Howard's.

On "Australia Day,"
I made my way through the flags to Redfern, an Aboriginal area in the
inner city, and celebrated what black Australians call Survival Day. Their
first "Day of Mourning and Protest" was held in 1938 on the 150th
anniversary of the white invasion. Over a thousand Aboriginal men and
women attended that first civil rights gathering, after having been
refused use of Sydney Town Hall. A long and painful campaign for freedom
and justice had begun, and endures, like an invisible presence.

In Redfern Park on
Survival Day, the flags were black, red and gold: colors of indigenous
skin, the earth and the sun. The only report I could find of Redfern the
next day was of a minor fight, which was no doubt fed to the papers by the
police. Should the word "Aboriginal" enter the public arena it must be
associated, where possible, with "no-hopers".

In Howard's
Australia, the ultimate "no-hoper" is a sick, terrified, deeply troubled
and abused young man called David Hicks. Hicks was a drifter, which was
once an Australian type known as a "swagman" and a "larrikin" and lauded
by our bush poets and balladeers. In the 1990s, Hicks became a Muslim and
drifted through Kosovo, then on to Afghanistan, where he was kidnapped by
the Americans and sent to their concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. Not
a shred of evidence exists that Hicks fought for al-Qaeda, or is a
terrorist. He is a drifter. Yet he is to face one of Bush's "military
commissions," for which torture is used to extract confessions, and there
is no right to cross-examine witnesses, no presumption of innocence and no
standard of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt." Even three of the
handpicked US military prosecutors have withdrawn, arguing that the
commission is rigged to secure convictions. Many of Australia's leading
jurists agree.

The Howard
government has said, in so many words, that David Hicks can rot. He is a
no-hoper, un-American, unaspirational.

Put out more flags.

John Pilger is an internationally renowned investigative journalist and
documentary filmmaker.His newest book, Freedom Next Time,
will be published in June by Bantam Press. Visit John Pilger's website:
www.johnpilger.com.
Thanks to Michelle Hunt at Granada Media.